Judith Krug: heroine of libraries, Internet, PATRIOT Act resistance

Consider giving a donation to your local public library this week in
honor of Judith Krug, whose death at the age of 69 was recently
announced.
Krug backed librarians around the country who defended their
collections from censorship for several decades--and when the Internet
came into libraries, she defended its freedom as well.

The history of library resistance to censorship and privacy violations
is a tribute to the staunch integrity of thousands of ordinary
librarians traversing the stacks throughout the United States, who
over the decades kept books ranging from the John Birch Society
Blue Book to Heather Has Two Mommies available to
anyone who wanted to read them. Krug was their official leader at the
American Library Association, as director of their Office for
Intellectual Freedom form 1967 on.

Key to their defense was the distinction between selection
and removal. People who objected to seeing books they didn't
like in the library would tell the librarians, "You choose which books
to stock in the first place; why can't you remove some?" Librarians
successfully argued that they could choose books on the basis of their
value, but that removing a book after it was chosen was a violation of
the First Amendment.

Krug was one of the leaders in a coalition that overturned the
"indecency" provisions of Communications Decency Act, That frontal
attack on the First Amendment was followed quickly by successors
attempting to control the Internet.
One such bill,
I'm sad to say, was sponsored by John McCain, who in this case didn't
follow his "maverick" tendency to choose good sense and moderation
over easy demagoguery.

The sponsors of such bills saw Supreme Court free speech rulings as
damage, and routed around them by drawing their censorship provisions
more and more narrowly until they succeeded in getting a bill upheld
that required Internet filters in public and school libraries. The ALA
and the majority of our countries librarians upheld open access
throughout. And nowadays, when poor and unemployed people are flocking
to libraries more than ever for Internet access, we must appreciate
the vigilance of these public servants.

Even more courageous was the resistance by librarians to the FBI's
demands in 2002 for the reading records of public library users. Krug
spoke out forcefully against the privacy invasions of the PATRIOT Act
and advised librarians to discard readings records as quickly as
possible so they could not be subpoenaed. I wonder how many librarians
had a chat about privacy with Google when it came to offer their books
online...